


(Don't) Give A Damn

by forochel



Series: mari fic [1]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Humor, Light Angst, Minor Original Character(s), mari-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 13:21:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10809846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forochel/pseuds/forochel
Summary: Mari, through the years.





	(Don't) Give A Damn

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to write something for Mari since ... well, since. I hope this does her justice. 
> 
> Dates & locations of Yuuri's competitions mentioned herein are not at all based in reality. 
> 
> Title is from Joan Jett & The Blackhearts' Don't Give a Damn About My Bad Reputation.
> 
>  
> 
> (5/5/17: updated additional tags & corrected some typos. one should not tag/edit in the wee hours.)

Mari didn’t remember much about her life before she turned four. There were faint sense impressions: the hot water of the onsen, the cold salt of the sea. The soft, rough cotton of a futon against her bare skin in the sticky heat of Kyushu summers. Standing at the threshold of the onsen, one hand gripped firmly in her mother’s skirts and the other on the worn foot of her toy rabbit. Staring into the courtyard, the yellow squares of light, the tall timbers of the place that would come to define the parameters of her life.

 **四**

Mari never liked the yellow hat she had to wear to school. 

She got into fights with bullies and had curly, flyaway hair, shorn close to the scalp because the onsen was always too hot to bear any longer.

“Boooo,” taunted silly Hasegawa Keiya. “Mari’s like a boooy.”

“Yeah?” Mari balled her hands up, feeling strangely stung. “Well, at least I’m a better boy than you!” 

Then she punched Keiya, who cried like the brat he was. 

“Mari!” exclaimed soft, lovely Kanao-sensei, holding a snivelling Keiya against her soft tummy. When Mari looked at Kanao-sensei, she felt a sour tenderness in the cavity under her ribs. “Why ... I need to speak to your mother.” 

Mari blinked up at Kanao sensei. Mari hadn’t moved from where she’d been playing with the wooden blocks since Kanao-sensei had come back into the classroom with Keiya attached to her like one of those gross slimy things on the rocks by the sea. 

“Mama can’t,” said Mari. 

“Eh? Why?” 

“She sleeps all the time at home now,” Mari said reasonably.

Kanao-sensei stared at her, before shaking her head and reaching out to pet Mari’s hair.

Mari wasn’t sure what happened after that, but the next day Kaasan, who was round like a beach ball but not half as colourful, and really _did_ spend a lot of time lying down at home, heaved herself to school with Mari.

“Kaasan,” Mari said solemnly. “You don’t have to.”

“Oh, darling,” said Kaasan. “I think I really do.” 

But she held Mari’s hand all the way to school. 

Kanao-sensei’s eyes went round and she raised her hand to her mouth, when Mari carefully led Kaasan in through the gates.

“Katsuki-san!” Kanao-sensei exclaimed. “Oh no, I’m so sorry for the trouble ... if only I had known ...” 

Which was silly, really, Mari thought. Mari had already _told_ her. 

“Ara, it’s no trouble at all,” said Kaasan warmly, and pushed Mari off to her classroom.

Of course Hasegawa Keiya was already there. He was sitting on a table, legs swinging, when Mari wandered in. She went to the back of the room to hang her bag and the hated hat up.

“Mari’s in trou~ble!” Keiya sang.

Keiya, Mari thought, just never learnt.

Saori-chan skidded into the room just then, breathless. “I saw Katsuki-san talking to — oh! Mari!” 

“I saw Mari’s mother too,” said Keiya. “She’s so fat!” 

Mari scowled and marched over to Keiya. 

“She’s not! She’s got my little brother in her tummy, and I’m gonna teach him to be a best boy ever!” 

And then Mari punched Keiya so hard he fell off the table. He really should have known better.

***

**七**

When Mari was seven, she tried to teach Yuuri how to do handstands by pulling him up by his feet. 

But Mari was a short and stout, like the teapot, and Yuuri was small and round and heavy and wriggling in protest. So she dropped him, and he rolled over on his head, sat up with his eyes and mouth wide open, before bursting into tears. 

Mari gasped. “No, no! Yuu-chan, no!” 

Unfortunately Tousan bustled in at exactly that moment, took in the scene, and knelt down to give Mari a stern look. 

“It wasn’t me!” Mari said immediately. 

“No?” asked Tousan, who wasn’t crinkling his eyes. Yuuri crawled closer to Tousan, who reached out with one sturdy arm and swept Yuuri in against his chest. 

Mari withstood Tousan’s disappointed look for as long as it took Yuuri to turn around in Tousan’s hold and glare up at Mari, still leaking tears. 

“I’m sorry.” Mari looked at the square weave of the tatami underneath her toes. “I just wanted Yuuri to do a handstand too.”

“A _handstand_?”

“Yeah! I was just trying to help h-him, but Yuuri w-was too heavy a-and s-so I d-dropped him!” Mari burst into tears too.

This didn’t make Tousan seem any less angry. “He’s not a doll, Mari!” 

Big, fat tears rolled down Yuuri’s red, wobbling face. He cried silently, mouth open but no sounds coming up, just eerily noiseless heaves of his little shoulders. Mari, on the other hand, cried loudly, even though she couldn’t help it. Kaasan always said that it was like she wanted the whole world to hear her and cry with her. 

“Aaaaah,” Tousan sighed, before hugging Mari close too. “Why do I have two such crybaby children?”

“I’m not a crybaby!” Mari cried against the soft wool of his jumper. “Yuuri’s a crybaby!” 

“Yare yare.” Tousan shook her a little bit. “Aren’t you finished being mean to your little brother? He’s the only one you have, you know.” 

“I wasn’t being mean to him!” Mari protested, wiping her nose on Tousan’s jumper. “I was trying’a _help_ him!” 

There was a pause then, and when Mari looked up, Tousan was looking despairingly at the door. It was the look Tousan got when he wanted Kaasan to appear right there and then. And then Yuuri pushed his head into Mari’s belly, still crying, and to show willing Mari put her arms around him and pet at his soft, wispy hair until he fell asleep. 

“Yuu-chan’s hair is so soft,” Mari whispered, scared that he would wake up cranky and crying again, feeling sleepy herself. She yawned. “Never cut it, Tousan.”

“Never?” Tousan sounded amused, as he lowered Mari and Yuuri to the mat. 

“No-o-o,” Mari yawned again. Yuuri was so squishy and warm against her, like a soft toy. And he always smelled nice, not like other babies. 

Mari liked the sound of Tousan’s laugh. It was like Baachan’s, which always made Mari want to giggle along with her. 

“See you later,” Tousan’s voice drifted through the soft cotton that was piling on top of her. 

“Mmm,” mumbled Mari, and fell asleep.

***

**十**

In an attempt to make her more feminine, Kaasan enrolled Mari in her senpai’s newly opened ballet studio. Mari threw a fit for about a week: misfolding jinbei and towels, breaking dishes, and making Yuuri cry when he tried to show her his wobbly, newly learnt hiragana. 

She couldn’t tell you _why_ she was upset, just that she was, and this made her even more upset. And Yuuri’s round little face crumpling and getting all red and wet was terrible; he cried like it was the end of the world, and his letters got all wet and splotchy too, from his tears. Mari ended up crying with him, and the worst part was that when Tousan found them crying at each other, he just laughed and said, “Ara, ara, aren’t you a little too old to be crying now, Mari?” 

To make it up to Yuuri, Mari pulled Nishigori Takeshi by the ear when the little brat shouted mean things as he whizzed past them on his bicycle on the way to school. She threatened to throw his overgrown ass into the sea, while Yuuri stood off to the side, and pulled until Nishigori cried aunty. Yuuri hugged her when they had to part ways in school, which meant that everything was okay between them again. 

At the end of that horrible week, Mari and Yuuri came home through the front, only to find a thin, long-haired woman they’d never seen before in the reception hall, flicking through the hand-drawn tourist maps of Hasetsu that Tousan was very proud of. 

She didn’t seem to have noticed them standing in the entrance, staring at her. 

“‘Here is a tori!’, huh?” she read to herself, before huffing out a laugh and sighing their dad’s name. Mari thought that she must be a good friend of their parents, to be so familiar. 

Then the woman turned around. She moved like ... like how Mari felt when she got a really good punch going, when she wound up for a hit and the bullies at school couldn’t dodge in time. It was beautiful. 

“Ah,” the woman said. “You must be Hiroko-chan’s little miscreants.” 

Mari didn’t know what that word meant, but it didn’t sound good. She stepped in front of Yuuri, pushing him behind her. There was a bit of a tug on the back of her shirt, Yuuri fisting his little hand in it.

The woman’s eyebrows, as thin as the rest of her, went right up her forehead. And then she smiled, and it made her look very different. 

“Well,” she said warmly. “You’re a really good older sister, aren’t you, Mari-chan?” 

“Who are you?” Mari asked. Mari knew she was, just like she knew her teachers already were despairing over her and that the onsen was the centre of her world. 

The woman laughed, before sweeping an elegant bow. “Okukawa Minako, Katsuki Mari-san. Please take care of me from now on.”

***

**十四**

Junior high was _the pits_. If high school was anything like this, Mari was going to technical college, except she’d looked up engineering and it looked dead boring. Even more boring than the history lesson after lunch, and even more boring than the home economics lesson at the end of the day. Like Mari needed to be taught how to use a kitchen. Apparently “that’s not how my mother does it, and she feeds way more people than you in a day” was not a good reason to disobey instructions. Teachers were so stiff and inflexible, and always looked through Mari like they’d already decided her worth as a student before the year started. 

“Oi, Mari,” said Kobayashi Kenta, spinning a pencil in his fingers like that would impress her. Try balancing ten dishes and plates with two arms and not drop them on the tatami, Kenta- _kun_. 

And then what Kenta said next made her stomach drop: “I heard you used to do ballet!” 

She scrambled over the top of her table to drag Kenta up by the front of his shirt and say, “What about it, punk?” 

“Oya,” Kenta smiled at her bared teeth. This was why they were friends. “It’s just nice to know you have a softer side.”

Mari dropped him back into his chair with a hard _thunk_. “I stopped doing ballet for a reason.” 

“And is the reason little Yuuri-chan?” 

It was, of course, but not for the reason Kenta thought. Whatever it was that Kenta thought.

Mari had learnt how to move from Minako-sensei, who really understood her. She hadn’t learnt to waft across parquet like a swan, or to leap like the air; Minako-sensei had taught her how to move smoothly, like a predator, how to control her limbs and let her anger simmer under her skin. Mari had taken that and learnt how to cower Yuuri’s bullies without her fists, how to lounge against the nearest vertical surface with indolent grace, how to eyeball creepy old men in the onsen and intimidate gaijin who disrespected onsen traditions. 

And Yuuri loved ballet and Minako-sensei, much more than Mari ever would. The money was better spent on her shy little brother, who only ever really came out of his shell at home and in Minako-sensei’s studio, which smelt like wax and powder. 

“No,” Mari told Kenta. “It’s because I _don’t_ have a softer side.” 

“Sure.” Kenta rolled his eyes. “Hey, it’s our last year of junior high, huh? Maybe you can grow a softer side for your project this year.” 

“Ha very ha,” said Mari. 

“What’s Mari’s project for this year?” Saori-chan asked, swinging in to her seat breathlessly and dropping yaki-pan from the canteen on Kenta’s head. 

“Developing a soft side.”

Saori-chan, who’d been there when they were four and Mari had punched stupid Hasegawa Keiya so hard he moved away to Fukuoka, laughed. “Don’t be silly, Mari-chan has a soft side. You just don’t deserve to see it.”

“Ow!” Kenta howled, but he was grinning.

Kenta was so full of shit. He walked to the elementary school with Mari every day to pick up his little sister, so he definitely got to see Mari’s soft side. She couldn’t help it, really, when Yuuri would come walking alone up to the gates with his backpack hiked high on his shoulders and his fringe flopping over his chubby little face. He was all alone in school this year too, his only friend, little Kota Yuuko, having entered junior high. 

So they met up to collect their respective siblings after home economics class. Or, well, she had home economics and he had carpentry. 

“It’s so unfair,” said Mari, kicking at pebbles along the way. “That’s the one useful skill I won’t learn at home.” 

“Are you going to insist on joining carpentry classes, Mari-san?” 

“Don’t call me that,” Mari said automatically. Then: “I’m thinking about it.”

Kenta laughed, bouncing a pebble back to her. “You can’t let the teachers have peace for one year, huh?” 

“I can cook better than stupid Yamanashi-sensei. And I know enough sewing to mend a jinbei. What else is there to learn?” 

“Yes, yes.” There’s a gleam in Kenta’s eye that just _begged_ to be punched out of his face. “You’re the very model of a domestic goddess.”

“Kenta,” snarled Mari, starting to give chase as Kenta danced out of the way of her kicking leg. “I am going to kill you.”

***

**十六**

“If you would only _apply_ yourself, Mari.” 

“Don’t you want to be better, Katsuki?” 

“Aaaaah, look at your ranking,” said Imai-sensei, her form teacher. “We know you’re capable of getting into a university, Mari. Maybe even Osaka University, if you stretched yourself.”

Mari was practising a look in her mirror at home: it was one that would say “I’m listening to you, but that’s all I have the energy for, because _urusai, naa_ but I grew up in the service industry and so this is the extent of my politeness.” 

It would also be appraising, and make the recipient slightly uncomfortable. 

She tried it now on Imai-sensei. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Imai-sensei, swatting the look away like a fly. He was rumoured to have run away from one of the _-guchi_ s in Tokyo to be a teacher in Kyushu. “Just tell me why.” 

Mari shrugged. “I know I can, but why should I?”

Imai-sensei looked at her for a long time. Mari was getting antsy; Yuuri’s practice would end soon, and even at a steady clip the bike ride to the ice rink was pretty long. 

“What do you want for yourself, Mari?” asked Imai-sensei.

It knocked the breath out of her. 

“I ...” started Mari. 

Now, understand: It wasn’t like Mari hadn’t thought of this before, or that Mari never wanted anything for herself. She wanted the way the Katsukis wanted: obsessively, consumingly, furiously. But she didn’t fixate, the way her little brother did. She wanted ragingly to go to Fukuoka for her favourite boyband’s concert. She wanted her soccer team to make it to Nationals. She wanted a computer of her own. She wanted the onsen to stop losing customers. She wanted her grandmother to either get better or die already. 

The last one was something she had only ever told one other person, and that was Yuuri’s stupid little dog, improbably named after some skinny Russian boy that her little brother was in love with. 

But all these things, Mari understood, were not what Imai-sensei was asking her. 

“I don’t know,” Mari breathed out, fingers clenching her knobbly, grass-stained knees. And then getting angry: “Why should I know! I’m only sixteen!” 

Imai-sensei surveyed her with a long, piercing look. He probably used to scare up protection money with that look. Mari should copy it. 

“You’re in your last year of high school next year, Mari.” 

“I know _that_.” Mari stood up abruptly. “May I go now, sensei? I have to go pick Yuuri up.”

The only reason Mari put up with Imai-sensei was that when she did things like this, he didn’t tell her off or lose his patience with her. He just looked at her with that piercing look, and then asked uncomfortable questions that she distantly recognised as important. 

“Isn’t Yuuri-kun twelve now? That’s beyond the age he can go home by himself, no?” 

Mari bit the inside of her cheek. Why she had to put in regular appearances at the junior high, which lay along the route home from the rink, was a family matter. Private. 

Imai-sensei hummed. “Your family is very important to you, huh?” 

“Of course!” Mari was shocked: wasn’t it important to everyone? 

“And Yuuri-kun even more so.” 

Mari switched to biting the inside of her other cheek. “I thought we were talking about me, sensei.” 

“Yes,” said Imai-sensei. “We are. Who we are - it’s defined by who our most important people are, isn’t it?”

***

**十八**

Her friends were all studying their butts off for university entrance exams. Mari had sent off applications to a couple of vocational colleges that were only a few hours’ train ride away from Hasetsu. All of them had been meticulously vetted by Imai-sensei, who wasn’t even her form teacher anymore, and Mari had already put them out of her mind. It was sakura season, which meant that it was tourist season, which meant that Mari had better things to do than sit in a corner and worry about things that she couldn’t help any more, _Yuuri_. 

“Are you sure, Mari?” Kaasan said to her when they were prepping for the dinner service. “Don’t hold yourself back for us.” 

Mari focused more than she absolutely had to on breading the tenderised pork chops. 

“Of course I’m sure,” she said in the lazy, low way she’d just started to affect. “I don’t do things unless I want to, didn’t you know?” 

That had the benefit of making Kaasan laugh and being half-true. 

More importantly, honestly: Who was going to take over the onsen? Yuuri? Give Mari a break. Anyone with two eyes and two neurons to rub together could tell that her little brother was going to go places, and that he belonged on the ice, not in a perpetually humid onsen ryokan. Mari’d spoken to Minako about this at her bar, though Minako had only given her a highball glass filled with cranberry juice. 

The ryokan was _hers_ in some bone-deep, undefinable way, ever since the first day she stepped into it and it’d been little more than just tall wooden walls and sweet-salty smelling tatami mats to her. Consciously or unconsciously, all the adults in her life had been grooming her to make every creaky joint and slippery slab of it her own. Mari hadn’t realised it at sixteen, but she knew it now.

There’s a reason she was in here in the kitchen getting her hands covered in egg and panko, while her pretty little brother was across Hasetsu getting his ass kicked on the ice. The ice was his, just as Yutopia would be hers. There was no question about it. 

Just as there was no question now that even though Yuuri’s English was better than Mari’s, she still was the one who was stuck with dealing with the _gaijin_ guests most of the time. He was shy and tended to stutter, hiding behind his big brown eyes and the coos of the guests at the “cute little son, suppose we’d better ask the sister instead.” 

Which led to this very moment:

Mari half-kneeling by the French tourists who’d arrived a few days before, caught after serving them their katsudon by Mrs Chagnon.

“Oh, Mari,” she enthused in English, “The train tour you recommended to us was simply wonderful! It was so elegant, the train, and the views! _Mon dieu_ , I am glad we paid for the lounge car.”

Her accent was thick, but not so thick as to be impenetrable. 

“I’m glad to hear that,” Mari said, and tried smiling a little. “Did you try the onsen in Yufuin?”

Mrs Chagnon laughed. “Oh no, we couldn’t possibly betray Yutopia.” 

That made Mari laugh, surprising even herself. But when she turned to ask Mr Chagnon for his feedback, she found him looking at her in a way Mari really didn’t like. 

“Yes, it was a very good recommendation,” Mr Chagnon said, his yellowed teeth showing. “Is there anywhere else you would like us to go, _cher_? Maybe you can come be our personal guide?”

Mari had seen this happen to other girls before, but for some reason she’d never expected it to happen to her. And now it was, and Mari didn’t know what to do. Why would he — and in front of his own wife, too! 

Her silence drew out into a long, awkward pause. Mari found herself twisting her hands in her lap, the way other girls did, the way she had literally never done before. She hated herself for this, a little bit. 

"Um," she said, sounding young and uncertain even in her own ears, and gave Mrs Chagnon a pleading look. 

To Mari's great relief, Mrs Chagnon picked up on it immediately — there was a faintly apologetic look in her eyes when she smacked her husband in the side and said to Mari, "Just ignore him! He's a tired old man. Don’t let us bother you, _cheri_." 

“O-of course,” Mari stumbled over her words, and rose quickly to her feet. “Please enjoy your meal.”

Well. Mari had something else to learn from Minako, it seemed. And when she owned the onsen, she was going to have _bouncers_. 

**二十一**

At twenty-one, Mari had: one hospitality administration associate degree earned over three tedious years, two parents appeased, and a little brother ... going to America. 

She’d been at one of her final classes, one of the really pointless customer experience ones, when Minako had dragged Yuuri home from one of his competitions by the scruff of his neck, bursting with the news. 

He was avoiding her, Mari was sure of it. Probably out of some misplaced sense of guilt. She tracked him down near the seawall one day at the end of spring, when it was starting to seem more like summer had eaten into the last cool days of April. 

“Oi, brat,” Mari said. He looked unhappily at the cigarette dangling between her fingers. “Ah, stop looking at me like that.” 

“It’s bad for your lungs, nee-chan.” 

Mari rolled her eyes. “Well, I’m not going to be a professional athlete, am I? I’m a _hospitality professional_. Certified and everything.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Yuuri drew his knees up to perch his feet on the seawall. He took up so little space, her tall little brother. Always making himself smaller, except for when he was skating. Mari wondered sometimes if it was because she always liked to make herself seem bigger than she actually was, an outsize presence that made Yuuri retreat within the boundaries of himself. 

They watched the sun setting over Hasetsu in silence together for a while, Mari puffing on her cigarette and watching Yuuri’s shoulders go up and down with every deep breath he took out of the corner of her eye. 

“I’m scared,” Yuuri confessed. Mari just about barely held back another eyeroll: when was her little brother _not_ scared? He was scared and he still went and did things anyway. That’s what made him brave. 

“Of picking up smoking?” Mari drawled, blowing out a white cloud of smoke. She watched it dissipate in the balmy breeze. 

“What - no!” 

Mari really couldn’t resist teasing him. “Good, it’s not good for athletes anyway.” 

“Nee-chan...” Yuuri trailed off and curled into his knees next to her. “I’m scared I ... what’s it like, going to college?” 

“Huh,” said Mari. “I went to vocational college, Yuuri, not university. And my college was in Fukuoka, not _America_.” 

“I know it’s not the same, but it’s ... different from school, right? All the people...”

Ah, Mari understood now. She thought back to her first year in Fukuoka, when her parents had insisted she move away and stay in the university dorms for at least one semester for “the experience”. What Mari had mostly taken away from that "experience" was: that other people her age were domestic disasters; that Yutopia had ruined her expectations for living spaces _for life_ ; her first sexual experiences; and this goddamn smoking habit. 

“It’s a bigger world out there, Yuuri.” Mari let her free hand cup the back of his neck. They didn’t really touch a lot, the two of them, not like when they were younger. “You’ll meet more people, _different_ people. It’ll be good for you, I think.” 

Yuuri hummed, face still buried in his knees. 

Mari’d just stubbed her cigarette out on the damp moss next to her bum when Yuuri shifted. “Nee-chan ...” He sounded embarrassed. “Did you ... did you have a boyfriend in Fukuoka?” 

Oh gods. “Not ... really...” 

Yuuri looked up at that, his large, brown eyes all innocent and liquid and wide. “Eh?” 

Mari sighed. “There was ... someone when I moved there in the first semester. But then, you know, I came back home and it was hard, with the train ride.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Mari hurried to say. “I prefer home. And he wasn’t that great anyway. But that’s why ‘not really’. The more important thing, Yuuri, was that I made friends there.”

“Like Hasami-san?” 

“Like Hasami,” Mari affirmed. 

Hasami came from a long line of innkeepers too, but her family ran a little hotel in Fukuoka. She was the second daughter, but had been the only one who’d understood when Mari moved out of the dormitories back to Hasetsu. 

Unlike Mari, she had bigger plans than her family business. 

Like Mari, her family were still her most important people. 

She’d visited Yutopia once, and admired the architecture and the food and the onsen, and nodded understandingly when Mari complained to her about the lack of technology and the upgrades that were sorely needed.

After graduation, Hasami had got a job with one of the bigger hotel chains in Japan, and was currently working her way through the ranks in Fukuoka.

“I’m going to make it to section leader by next year if it kills me!” Hasami had told her during their last phone call. 

“Well, if it kills you I won’t mourn you,” Mari had said, and laughed at Hasami’s squawk of indignation. 

In the here and now, Yuuri heaved a sigh. “I hope I make a friend like Hasami-san...” 

“Well,” Mari said consideringly. “Otherwise you could always unleash your inner Kyushu beast. If the movies are right, that will definitely make you friends in America.” 

Looking at her little brother flushing and protesting loudly, Mari thought he’d definitely have no trouble with Americans wanting to make friends with him. And then she thought better of it. 

“Ah, never mind, Yuuri, don’t drink.” She ruffled his hair. “Stay pure and innocent like this forever, okay? And make sure that coach of yours takes care of you.”

***

**二十三、四**

Hasetsu was a shrinking town. Half her graduating high school class had left for bigger, brighter places, and of the two people Mari actually cared about: Saori had settled in Fukuoka with a job in a publishing firm while Kenta had, of all things, taken up a pottery apprenticeship half the prefecture away. 

And Hasami was all the way in Osaka, having been promoted to the regional office. At least Mari had a futon to crash on if she ever made it up there. 

To be fair, Mari had almost taken Hasami up on her offer, when Yuuri came back for Nationals, but then December was always a busy period, what with the solstice and then the Christmas travellers enjoying Fukuoka in colder weather. She had only just, the previous year, managed to bulldoze her way into creating a new website for Katsuki Yuutopia, setting up an online booking system, and getting their ryokan listed on the JNTO’s pages for Saga Prefecture as well as a few international booking websites. 

All around them, Mari had witnessed the onsen in her town closing down one by one. Like hell was she going to let _her_ onsen go the same way as the others. She was convinced that that had, and if only she had the statistical skills to show it, directly led to the highest rate of bookings in December their ryokan had had since Mari was sixteen. Perhaps she ought to send her numbers to Yuuri and get him to use that American university education of his for good. 

And now she was having a simmering disagreement with her parents, usually so easygoing, about ploughing back some of the profits from the Christmas and hanami tourist seasons into getting the whole ryokan outfitted with wifi. 

Whenever Mari tried bringing it up again, her parents started making noises about her getting a boyfriend. Getting married. 

“You’ll be twenty-five next year, you know,” Kaasan said. “I’d already had you when I was twenty-five!”

“I want us to win,” Mari said. “Look at all the onsen closing down. I don’t want that to be Yuutopia. I don’t have time for that kind of thing now.” 

“Well,” said Kaasan, pretending to not have heard any of that. “What about Kenta-kun? You’ve been friends for so long, and he gave us that discount on those plates.” 

Try as she might, Mari couldn’t stop the expression of horrified disgust that her face twisted into. 

When she looked pleadingly at her Tousan, he had the usual placid smile of benevolent amusement firmly in place, eyes crinkling so no one could tell what he was actually thinking.

In the meantime, her brother was living it up in Detroit, enjoying the single life, and getting boxes of sponsorship goods delivered to the onsen still. It wasn’t that Mari didn’t enjoy laughing at the increasingly ridiculous advertisements that Glico managed to convince him to film every year, or the way Yuuri’s personal endorsement from the leading maker of shochu down south in Satsuma kept Yuutopia competitively supplied with quality shochu that Minako salivated over, but —

She felt suddenly, breathlessly, achingly jealous. 

So she said to her mother, “Why the hell don’t we just call our katsudon the Katsuki Yuuri don?” 

Kaasan blinked at her. “Ara, won’t that be exploiting Yuuri?” 

“Do you want to make money or not, Kaasan?”

And, well, Mari got her financial intelligence from _somewhere_ , so they did that, experienced a slight surge in sales to skating otaku, and Mari treated herself to a trip to watch the NHK Trophy in Fukuoka that year and hang out with Saori. 

She supposed one good thing about having a reigning National Champion for a brother was that it was very easy for one to score complimentary tickets to skating events. Yuuri had been sheepish about it, when he’d emailed Mari back to say _Ah, I’m so amazed they agreed, but somehow the JSU listened to me and said they would have two tickets under your name!_ as well as _P.S. if it isn’t too much trouble could you please bring Vicchan?_

Which only just went to show that Yuuri was still the silly little boy she’d attempted to lift upside down when he was three. 

“I can’t believe Yuuri-chan is so grown-up now,” Saori exclaimed. She waved her highball around, coming dangerously close to spilling her whiskey-and-soda onto the forest green of her kotatsu blanket. “And the national champion! Who would’ve thought.”

“I did,” Mari said, oddly stung.

Saori smiled at her. “I guess you always believed in Yuuri-chan, huh.” 

“Of course I did,” Mari scoffed. “What else was I supposed to do?”

“Aaaah,” Saori sighs. “And Yuuri-chan is so beautiful now. He must have a lot of fans, huh.” 

“Don’t even talk about it.”

“Haha! Does he get weird fanmail?”

Mari thought about the aluminium rubbish bin they had in the back garden, dedicated solely to burning some of the more egregious bits of fanmail Yuuri got from creepers all over the world. He did his best to help promote Yuutopia, bless him, but his efforts did have their drawbacks. 

“You don’t want to know,” she tells Saori. And after a thoughtful pause and an interlude where they had to scramble after Vicchan and make sure he didn’t reveal himself to any of Saori’s nosy neighbours, the building being technically a pet-free residence, Mari said, “It definitely helps us make more money, though.”

**二十七**

***

It had been a good year:

In February, Yuutopia got a TripAdvisor decal and Mari managed to practise what she’d learnt in her “Customer Relations in the Internet Age” course all those years ago, dealing with guest reviews on the website. 

In April, they held a joint hanami-and-ballet exhibition in the ryokan that had guests coming from all over the Southwest of Japan, and Minako getting smashingly drunk with a bunch of French-speaking, ballet-dancing tourists who were just as tall and thin and graceful as she was. Mari picked up some French from a particularly solicitous dancer, amongst other things. 

“Come to France,” he told her. “I think you’d get along very well with the French girls.” 

“I don’t speak French,” Mari said flatly. 

“Oh, but I think we communicate well enough, don’t we?” 

In summer, her parents hired on extra hands and packed Mari off to Hokkaido with Saori-chan as a belated birthday present. She spent an enjoyable 2 weeks intimidating them into the highest service standards before flying off with Saori and taking thousands of photos, and stuffing herself on seafood, ice-cream, and yubari melon slices from the roadside stalls. 

“Does this look like hell to you?” Saori asked, posing for a selfie at the signposted scenic viewpoint in Jiyugaoka. 

Mari looked at the rolling clouds of sulphuric fumes obscuring the feet of the tall, green trees, the hints of a placid lake revealed in flashes, and the mountains sweeping up to the depthless, blue sky.

“No. No it doesn’t.” 

Further up the trail, where fewer tourists ventured, they sat and ate their train station bento.

“Mari,” began Saori carefully.

Mari made an enquiring noise around her mouthful of food.

“This is the first time you’ve been so far away from Hasetsu, isn’t it?” 

Mari made an affirmative noise, and swallowed. “Yeah, why?” 

The way Saori hummed and kept her eyes trained on the view spreading out before them was making Mari nervous. 

“Do you ... I’m not sure, of course, but ... do you feel like we’re leaving you behind, Mari?” 

The question didn’t really register, at first. Saori’s right here with her, wasn’t she? 

But then Mari thought about it, looking at the skeins of mountains unreeling hazily into the horizon. 

“I’m happy with what I have,” she started slowly. “I ... have never wanted more.” 

“Do you want to? Want more?” 

Mari chewed over it, unsure of why Saori was pressing. If she were sixteen again, she’d probably have stood up and walked off. 

“I wouldn’t mind seeing more of the world, I guess,” Mari said. “Go travelling, you know.” 

She had the feeling that Saori wasn’t really contented with her answer, but it was true: Mari had something that belonged to her, and that she belonged to. She didn’t have to wear office clothes, and everyone was used to her ways. She’d like to have a look at other countries, but at the end of the day, like a homing pigeon, she would return to Hasetsu. 

And she would do so laden with omiyage, as she was this time: chocolates and _four_ whole yubari melons that she’d hand-carried all the way back down south like the filial daughter that she was. The broad compound of Yuutopia, and the warmly lit courtyard so little changed from when she had been four, would welcome her, and Mari would feel her bones settle again. 

When the weather started turning, just before the autumn peak season, Mari was pretty damned sure that one of the Michelin tasters had come by undercover and that her mother’s food was going to make Bib Gourmand, and her parents finally - finally! after a three year war of attrition - agreed to make wifi available throughout the ryokan. 

And then on one unpleasantly wet December evening, she killed her baby brother’s dog. 

Excitable little Vicchan, named for that ridiculously pretty skater her brother - Mari was positive - was _still_ pining after, who in the last few years had grown grey around the muzzle and become _Mari_ ’s dog as well. A miniature stand-in for Yuuri in her life.

For the first time in a long while, Mari didn’t know what to do. 

She didn’t know what to do about the swelling, aching pressure in her throat and her ears and in between her eyes; nor what to do with her hands, clenched together in her lap; nor what to do with the lasting image of Vicchan lying still, fur matted with rain and blood, in Doctor Higashi’s operating theatre before she’d been shooed out. 

So Mari just sat there, frozen in the warmly lit waiting area, waiting for the verdict: Vicchan surviving with just a limp; Vicchan surviving but a quadraplegic dog for the rest of its life; Vicchan - dead. 

Her thoughts shied away from it, circling round, before settling on that possibility. The probability of it. The eventual inevitability of it. She knew, she knew, she knew. It was the only thought in the cloudy blankness blanketing her mind: just the moment of impact playing out over and over again before her eyes. Vicchan’s vulnerable little body flying across the tarmac, leash whipping out like a taunt after him. 

Shame was creeping in around the corners, now, twinned with guilt: that she had let Vicchan tug out of her grasp. That her first instinct had been to kick in the side of the car, before she’d rushed over to Vicchan’s terrifyingly still body. The driver had taken them to the vet, anyway, hadn’t said anything as Mari sat stone-faced next to him, cradling Vicchan gently in her lap. The car had been filled with Vicchan’s soft, pained little whimpers, the laboured whine of his breath. 

“Mari.”

“Mari.”

“ _Mari_.” 

Mari jumped, head snapping up to stare at her mother. 

“Ah, darling,” said Kaasan softly, in a way Mari hadn’t heard directed at her in _years_ , before folding Mari into her arms. Mari blinked into Kaasan’s comfortable shoulder, and was surprised to find that her lashes were already wet. “There now,” Kaasan mumbled nonsensically. “There now.” 

She let Kaasan handle it all, for once, retreating into the attention that Yuutopia demanded from her, into the rhythms of rising with the sun and sleeping early. Mari took her feelings out on the futons, beating them in the cold, dry sun, and then on the flagstones paving the baths, and then finally, cathartically, on putting together a shrine for Vicchan.

Mari knew, distantly, that Kaasan had called Yuuri to let him know, just as she distantly knew that if she weren’t feeling quite so much like she was trying to move things on the other side of a glass wall, she’d have stopped her mother. 

And oh, now, her baby brother was making her heart ache on the TV screen in the dining area, as he stumbled and fell, and his face reflected the storm brewing in her own chest. All Mari wanted to do was sit with him and cry loud and ugly, the way they had together when he’d been six and she ten, the upset refracting between the two of them until it evolved into an entirely new monster.

***

**二十八**

A little under half a year was enough for Mari to reach equilibrium again, and greet her little brother with equanimity and a fortifying cigarette. 

And if twenty-seven had been a good year up until that rending close, then twenty-eight was _beyond words_. 

“I can’t believe Yuuri-chan is living with his wet dream,” said Saori over the phone, laughing.

Mari cackled. “Don’t ever let him know you know about that.” 

“ _Literally_ wet, too!” Saori sounded like she was crying with laughter. Mari’d told her all about Yuuri’s mad, unthinking scramble for the onsen, and the way his shriek had echoed throughout the ryokan when he’d been confronted with the naked truth of Viktor Nikiforov. 

Later on, Hasami furiously messaged her on LINE, complete with angry bear stickers. “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOUR RYOKAN GOT AN INTERNATIONAL CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENT BEFORE TOYOMI!!!” 

Followed with: “TELL THEM TO STAY IN A TOYOMI HOTEL WHEN THEY GO TO SHIKOKU”

When Mari’d informed her that they’d be there for a day trip, Hasami had replied with: “STOP SABOTAGING MY CAREER, MARI, GODS.” 

In the wider view of things, Mari supposed that she was uniquely equipped to deal with the phenomenon that was Viktor Nikiforov. 

“Is he really an _ikemen_?” Kenta asked when she went out to his pottery workshop to collect their order of tea mugs, sake cups, and tokkuri. A bachelorette party all the way from Hong Kong had annihilated the larger part of their old supply, and very sheepishly offered to reimburse them an entirely new set. 

Kaasan’s katsudon and its Bib Gourmand worked _wonders_. 

“What?” Mari couldn’t help but shout, laughing. 

“No, really.” Kenta rinsed his hands and arms free of slip. “I’ve seen photographs of Yuuri’s man. I just want to know if he looks like that in real life, or if the gods actually do exist.”

Mari took a step back from him. “I’m not with him,” she announced to any gods or spirits that might be listening. 

Kenta rolled his eyes, before smiling that same toothy grin. “I’ll take that as proof that they don’t —”

“YES,” Mari shouted over him, following him over to where the finished ceramics were stacked up. “He is exactly as handsome as he is in the photographs, but what they don’t tell you is that he’s ...”

She trailed off there, searching for words. 

“Mari.” Kenta paused in the act of rolling up a tokkuri in newspaper. “Are you _in love with him_?” 

She jerked back. “What the fuck, _no!_ That’s disgusting!” 

“Well, good.” Kenta smirked. “Otherwise you’d really be living in a dorama. One Russian ... two siblings ... rivals in love ...”

Mari kicked at him. “Shut up!” 

Kenta had to put down the mug he was wrapping, so hard was he laughing. 

“Argh.” Mari gave up, picking the mug up to finish wrapping it. “Yuuri’s already living out his senpai-noticed-me dreams as it is, anyway. That’s more than enough drama for one household.” 

The thing was, Mari could deal with the surreal waking dream that Viktor’s arrival had sunk the whole of Hasetsu into. She could more than deal with kicking the paparazzi out of Yuutopia, though only after scamming them into ordering at least a tokkuri of sake and some top-grade sashimi to go with it. But what she had trouble dealing with was really badly accented Japanese that sounded like a Saga elder decided to go on a bender with Russian vodka and gargled some rocks on top of it. 

“You need one of those, what do you call them, audiobooks,” Mari said to Viktor as he hovered over her shoulder, carefully watching how she rolled up towels. Yuuri was at Minako’s for ballet practice, and Viktor had sloped home earlier in the afternoon. Mari’d got sick of him lounging around in his loosely tied jinbei like some kind of gravure model in their front room, and thus was putting him to work.

“ _Nihongo_ ,” Viktor insisted petulantly, in that terrible way he had where he pitched the syllables all wrong and elongated vowels that didn’t need elongating. “ _Onegaishimasu_.” 

Mari thwapped him with a towel. “Audiobook first,” she said clearly in English, before switching to Japanese. “And it’s _onegaishimasu_. _Onegai_ if you’re close friends.” 

And so they spent the next hour folding towels and linens - which, to his credit, Viktor picked up pretty fast; the man had good hands - and listening to Viktor practise saying one version of ‘please’ in Japanese over and over again. 

When Mari heard faintly, a few nights later, Viktor whining at Yuuri to let them sleep together, _onegaaaaaaaaaaaai_ , Mari reminded herself that her baby brother was a full grown adult who’d gone through the whole American ‘college experience’, and should be capable of taking care of himself. And then she chuckled herself to sleep. 

Summer wore on, hot and lazy. The air-conditioning broke down, and of course Viktor “knows no limits” Nikiforov paid to have the entire system rehauled. 

“Oh gods,” Yuuri whispered to her, as they watched Viktor ‘oversee’ the Toshiba handymen at work. “I already owe him so much in coaching fees.”

Mari gave him a long look over her watermelon slice. “I’m pretty sure you don’t need to worry about it, little brother.”

“How can I not,” Yuuri moaned. “Coaching fees cost so much, and I looked up how much this system costs online, nee-chan. It was _so much_.”

“It’s a capital investment.” Mari shrugged. What she thought privately was that it was as much an investment for the ryokan as it was for Viktor. A more obvious announcement of his intentions to put down roots Mari had never seen before. 

The thing about Viktor was that as capricious as he appeared to be, there was a serious commitment to helping her brother underscoring everything he did. It was there in the terribly healthy meals he made Yuuri labour over; it was there in the terrible bruises marching up and down Yuuri’s skin; and it was there in the terrible stretches he forced Yuuri into everywhere, even the godsforsaken onsen.

“When is the wedding, Mari-chan?” Old Suzuki-san asked her one evening, in his cups. “Will it be held here?” 

Half the dining room seemed to be listening in. She was glad that Yuuri and Viktor were in Viktor’s bedroom doing ... whatever. Reviewing tape. 

“They’re not getting married,” Mari said firmly.

“Ehhh? But they’re so close to each other!” 

“And when Suzuki-san says close,” sniggered incorrigible old Sakai-san. “He _means_ close.” 

“They’re just very enthusiastic about making sure Yuuri wins.” Mari set the fresh bottle of beer down a little harder than she meant to. “And they’re taking their time.”

At least, Mari hoped that’s what Viktor was doing. 

Mari was, despite herself, pretty damn fond of the man. Especially when he was so obviously desperate to make Yuuri happy. 

And especially when the kiss in China inspired her mother to design a Valentine’s Day menu. 

(“Why,” Yuuri’d whined when he’d come back to see Mari and their mother having a spirited disagreement about the best pairings. 

“Capitalism,” Mari’d retorted, before going back to making her case for unpasteurised sake.

And Kaasan had won the argument with, “I’m so proud of you, Yuuri.”)

“I CANNOT BELIEVE,” Hasami shouted at her, having resorted to calling Mari directly. “THIS IS CHEATING.”

“You could always come work with me,” Mari said lazily, smiling up at her ceiling. “We’ve got enough budget to hire on extra hands. We’re booked through April next year, it’s crazy.” 

“Oh, that’s good,” Hasami said at a normal volume. “YUURI BETTER STAY WITH US FOR NATIONALS!” 

“I think that’s up to the JSF.”

“WELL-!” Hasami paused. “Well, actually. Okay, I gotta go. See you when you come up here in December.” 

And then she hung up, and Mari reflected that this was exactly why they were friends. 

“Oh,” said Yuuri, looking overwhelmed, when Mari showed him the booking system. “I … I suppose you’ll need more hands next year, huh?” 

Mari opened her mouth to tell him they had enough to hire on a few more part-timers, before the wobble in his voice set off alarms in her head. 

“Yeah,” Mari drawled, carefully casual. “So you better keep on winning those medals, right?” 

The little hitch in Yuuri’s shoulders, the way he froze for a second, the patent falseness of the way he smiled and said, “I’ll keep on doing my best!” made Mari frown inside. 

So she went to her father and said, “Ne, Tousan, wouldn’t it be good if family were with Yuuri at the Finals this time round?”

And Tousan looked her knowingly. 

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll see if Matsumoto-kun and Nagano-san can come on full-time then.” 

And that’s how Mari ended up going to Barcelona with Minako, and also her brother and his boyfriend-slash-coach. Twenty eight: completely insane. 

Barcelona was like nothing Mari had ever seen before: the wide, open streets; the tall, beautiful Westerners; the Christmas lights strung up between lamp-posts that she almost walked into, she so busy looking all around her at the Christmas market. The Sagrada Familia was an experience, too. She’d seen churches in Japan, of course, but nothing like this: the ruthless vitality of it, the grotesque carvings caught in eternal limbo between ecstasy and pain, the cranes building it ever higher. Catholics, Mari imagined, must pray very differently from the Japanese. 

Mari felt almost like a child again, having to be corralled by Minako whenever she started wandering off, wide-eyed with wonder. And then being taken shopping by Minako, the way her parents brought them to Fukuoka for special treats when she and Yuuri were small, though this time she was being coaxed into actually buying things. 

And then, of course, Yuuri got fucking engaged, attempted to break it off within 24 hours – as far as she could understand it through Viktor’s tight-jawed, wet-eyed summary of events in the _ensuing_ 24 hours – and caused yet another minor scandal by the rinkside after his free skate. She was going to turn him upside down and drop him on his head the moment his exhibition skate was over. 

Barcelona was forever going to be associated with Yuuri’s dramatics in her mind.

“Yuu-chan,” Mari said sweetly while they were waiting for their departing flight in the airport. Viktor had gone on ahead to St Petersburg, ahead of _his-fiancee-her-brother_.

The whole-body flinch Yuuri did was very satisfying. 

“When were you going to tell me you got engaged?” _After all of seven months_ , she didn’t say. 

“Aaaaaah…” Yuuri rubbed at the back of his neck. “I’m sorry…”

“That wasn’t my question, Yuuri.” 

“Well, the thing is …” Yuuri looked reluctant and embarrassed, but like _hell_ was Mari going to let him off this time. Not for something as important as his heart. “I didn’t really think of it as an engagement … ring? It was … a promise. A wish. Until Viktor said it, but the moment he said it I … I don’t know.” 

Mari looked at him. It was a good thing Minako had gone off to the bathroom. 

“Yuuri. You do want to be engaged to Viktor, right?” 

“Yes!” Yuuri shot up straight in his seat, looking almost indignant. “Of course I do!” 

“Okay then.” Mari thought about it for a while, before continuing, wishing very much she could have a smoke. “You know … be careful with him, okay? Don’t look at me like that. I’ve already told him. But you have to be careful with him too.” 

Yuuri looked down at his shoes. “I know,” he said softly. “I will.”

Later, on the plane, Mari leaned across the aisle and poked Yuuri in the shoulder. 

“Yuu-chan,” she said mischievously. “I just looked up how many babies you need to form a hockey team. “

Yuuri’s splutters and Mari’s laughter were so loud the businessman diagonally across the aisle from Mari gave them a deeply dirty look.

And even later, when they’d landed in Fukuoka a confusing two days after they’d taken off, and somehow managed to stumble their way dazedly onto the correct train and off at the correct stop, Mari and her little brother were deposited by Minako in front of their home and practically fell over the genkan on top of each other. 

“Get off me,” Mari grunted. “You’re way too heavy.”

“I can’t,” whined Yuuri. “There’s a dog on top of me.”

And if the immense love Maccachin had for Yuuri right from the get-go hadn’t been an indication of the turn this year was going to take in April, Mari would punch herself in the face.

“Well,” Mari said to her mother even later, after she’d had a bracingly cold shower and was trying to stay awake by sorting the laundry. She was feeling extremely loopy. “You don’t have to worry about someone taking over the inn after me now.”

“Eh?” 

“Yuuri and Viktor are definitely going to adopt a hundred babies. One of them can be my successor. I’ll pick them through a televised contest.” 

“Mari!” 

The future spun out in front of her: the business of the next few months, her plans for summer, and the next year and the year after that, and after that, and after that. No babies except for Yuuri’s probable little brats in the future, and her family around her as she grew old together with her onsen.

Mari threw her head back and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> The post-secondary education system in Japan is split into the more 'academic' route - students go to university, and more 'vocational' routes. I have not used the Japanese names for these institutions but elected to translate as best I can. 
> 
> I'd love to talk about Mari and all the various bits that I cut from the fic with you! Please leave a comment, otherwise I'm also forochel at tumblr. Staying on brand for over a decade :Db (eta: i've talked and comment-ficced at people in the comments, if you're at all interested.)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] (Don't) Give a Damn](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11017212) by [read by lunchee (lunchee)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunchee/pseuds/read%20by%20lunchee)




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